Amanda > Amanda's Quotes

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
― Oscar Wilde

“In the bitter waves of woe, 
Beaten and tossed about 
By the sullen winds that blow 
From the desolate shores of doubt,­­ 

When the anchors that faith had cast 
Are dragging in the gale, 
I am quietly holding fast 
To the things that cannot fail: 

In the darkest night of the year, 
When the stars have all gone out,  That courage is better than fear,  That faith is truer than doubt; 

And fierce though the fiends may fight,  And long though the angels hide, 
I know that Truth and Right 
Have the universe on their side; 

And somewhere, beyond the stars, 
Is a Love that is better than fate; 
When the night unlocks her bars 
I shall see Him, and I will wait”
― Washington Gladden

“I thank you God for this most amazing day, for the leaping greenly spirits of trees, and for the blue dream of sky and for everything which is natural, which is infinite, which is yes.”
― e.e. cummings

“Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.”
― C.S. Lewis

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”
― C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

“Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life.”
― Mark Twain

“It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it.”
― Oscar Wilde

“It is art that makes life, makes interest, makes importance, and I know of no substitute for the force and beauty of it's process.”
― Henry James

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”
― Emily Dickinson, Selected Letters

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
― George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

“The menu is not the meal.”
― Alan Watts

“Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them, at all. The magic is only in what the books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.”
― Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums

“You never have to change anything you got up in the middle of the night to write.”
― Saul Bellow

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Releasing the Creative Genius Within You

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
― Elizabeth Appell

“My turn shall also come:
I sense the spreading of a wing.”
― Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems

“Oh, that's the beauty of the rose, that it blossoms and dies.”
― Willa Cather

“There can be no belief if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.”
― Abhinav Bhalla

“Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
― John Green, The Fault in Our Stars

“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“Stepping onto a brand-new path is difficult, but not more difficult than remaining in a situation, which is not nurturing to the whole woman.”
― Maya Angelou

“Therefore, dear Sir, love your solitude and try to sing out with the pain it causes you. For those who are near you are far away... and this shows that the space around you is beginning to grow vast.... be happy about your growth, in which of course you can't take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don't torment them with your doubts and don't frighten them with your faith or joy, which they wouldn't be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn't necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again; when you see them, love life in a form that is not your own and be indulgent toward those who are growing old, who are afraid of the aloneness that you trust.... and don't expect any understanding; but believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself you would have to die if you were forbidden to write.”
― Rainer Maria Rilke